The Branch Manager perceives a need for an additional dealer in an area. Need occurs if any existing dealer leaves or is removed. It could also happen when the company expands into new territory.

The Branch Manager has to convince the general manager of the division about the need for anew dealer.

The selection process for the dealer begins with placing advertisements in newspapers and trade magazines inviting applications. Applications for dealership are directed to the concerned branch manager.

The branch manager then reviews the application forms and prepares a shortlist if necessary. The company has not laid down any concrete guidelines for shortlisting at this stage. The branch manager is allowed to exercise his discretion.

The shortlisted applicants are interviewed by the branch manager along with the regional sales manager of the division. Whatever additional information is required is obtained from the applicants during the interview. The dealers are evaluated on:

Prior business record

The capability of maintaining and running his own showroom

Financial strength

Inventory: The dealer must have enough working capital for maintaining specified level of inventory. This condition is however is applied only in the case of dealers whose territories are located considerably away from a branch office. This is because there is a company owned warehouse along with every branch office and for dealers located in the same cities there is no necessity to maintain separate inventory

Contacts with customers

Availability of salesforce to service customer effectively. In addition, technicians also need to be present to meet the after-sales service requirements of the products

The final selection decision is made after talking with the bankers of the applicant. This is done to check the veracity of information regarding financial strength and prior business experience. It is only after the company is satisfied regarding all aspects of he information, that it sends the dealer an appointment letter

The appointment letter lays down several terms of the contract that have to be fulfilled by the dealer. The company expects the dealers not to sell any competitors’ products. The dealer is also expected to conduct his business only within the clearly demarcated sales territory allocated to him by the company.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

The type of consumers they cater to and the expectations of the consumer. This includes customer needs that the retail outlet is fulfilling, the factors influencing the consumers to choose a particular outlet, and the extent to which they patronize the outlets.

The behavior of the retailer with respect to displays, inventory, etc.

These profiles will help the marketer identify the type of outlets that would be catering to the target segment identified in the marketing strategy or the outlets that would suit their positioning strategy.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Social interactions establish the role that people play in a society and their authority responsibility pattern. Their roles and patterns are supported by a society’s institutional framework, which includes, for example, education and marriage.

Social roles are established by culture. For example, a woman can be a wife, a mother, a community leader, and/or an employee. What role is preferred in different situations is culture-bound. Most Swiss women consider household work as their primary role. For this reason, they resent modern gadgets and machines. Behavior also emerges from culture in the form of conventions, rituals, and practices on different occasions such as during festivals, marriages, get-togethers, and times of grief or religious celebration.

With reference to marketing, the social interactions influence family decision-making and buying behavior and define the scope of personal influence and opinion. In Latin America and Asia the extended family is considered the most basic and stable unit of social organization. It is the center for all economic, political, social, and religious life. It provides companionship, protection, and a common set of values with specifically prescribed means for fulfilling them. By contrast, in the US the nuclear family (husband, wife, and children) is the focus of social organization. The US wife plays a more autonomous role than the Dutch wife in family decision-making. Thus social roles vary from culture to culture and are likely to affect marketing behavior.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Mainstream economics uses some simple starting points; it believes that they are the best possible. First is that agents have more wants than they can attain, so that they feel scarcity; in fact, for practical purposes, wants are assumed to be endless. Second, third and fourth are that agents are self-interested, rational, and the best judges of their own well-being. These four assumptions are indeed usually good starting points, rather than starting by assuming that agents are completely fulfilled, altruistic, irrational, and not well-placed to evaluate their own situation. They are not equally good as finishing points. Sometimes good arguments exist for not accepting them.

An assumption that agents are the best judges of their own well being is less questionable for businesspeople and corporations, given the resources they have for analysis. Debate focuses more on consumers. The phrase consumer sovereignty is sometimes read descriptively, to mean that consumers are sovereign, in that procedures are induced via profit-seeking and competition to provide what consumers want. Sometimes it is read normatively, to mean that consumers should be sovereign, their wishes should prevail concerning what is good for them. The normative claim can rest on three different bases: that consumers do make good choices; that the alternative stance is worse – to use someone else’s judgments and estimates of what is good for a person and how good it is; or quite differently, that people have the right to make their own choices and mistakes.

Consumers will not make good choices automatically and unconditionally. Our wants are not simple; for example, some are wants to not to have other wants (such as the desire to smoke or a compulsion to gamble). Establishing a mature balance between wants involves skills. Choice is also unlikely to bring satisfaction if taken on the basis of weak information. Markets often do not provide consumers with full and reliable information, for it is hard to exclude people from information and therefore to ensure payment for it, so its market supply is weakened. Instead, in a commerce-dominated society, one of the main types of information that adults get will be images that say the good life is obtained through high consumption of commodities; there is too little counteracting public information.

The issue of consumer sovereignty goes beyond whether choices are good for the chooser. Other people are affected. Some wants may thus be unacceptable, notably wants that bring harm to others, including even wants to harm others. Mainstream economists have unfortunately often taken a don’t-want-to-know approach to ethics in which they confuse acceptance of all wants with a value-neutral stance.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

The term mistake is used in contract law to describe the situation in which one or both of the parties to an agreement acted under an untrue belief about the existence or nonexistence of a material fact. In mistake cases, unlike fraud and misrepresentation cases where the victim is also acting under a mistaken belief about the facts, the mistaken belief about the facts is not the product of a misstatement by the other party. Mistaken in this sense does not include errors of judgment, ignorance, or a party’s mistaken belief that he or she will be able to fulfill certain obligations under a contract. The things that were said about materiality and fact in the law misrepresentation hold true in mistake cases.

In deciding mistake cases, courts often seem to be trying more obviously to do justice than in other kinds of cases. This is why decisions in mistake cases sometimes seem to depart from the announced rules of law dealing with mistake.

Mistake cases are classified as mutual or unilateral, depending on whether both or only one of the parties was acting under a mistaken belief about a material fact. Mutual mistake is always a basis for granting rescission of the contract at the request of either party. Clearly, no meeting of the minds took place and therefore no true contract was ever formed.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

The professional and the institution for which the professional works should compile a relatively brief list of core values. These are values that help determine what the priorities are and how one aspires to act. Ten core ethical values are described:

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

All training, whether it is provided by the training department or by you, should accomplish two objectives. It should provide people with the skill, meaning the ability, to do the job. Or it should provide them with the will or the desire to do the job. Some training will accomplish both.

The skills training you provide your people will be dictated by the needs of the business and the current skills of the people. First you must determine what your people need to learn. Here are some questions that will help lead you to the answer:

What are the goals and objectives of the area?

What are the responsibilities of each job?

What are the standards the people are expected to meet?

What are the skills needed to meet the standards, fulfill the responsibilities, and achieve the objectives?

What are the current skills and abilities of the people?

What is the deficit between the skills needed and the current skills of the people?

Providing people with the skills to do the job is only half the training job. People must be motivated to apply the skills they have learned; therefore, some of the training should be principally motivational in nature. As you develop plan for motivating your people, you will want to ask yourself these questions:

What should they know about the company in order to have a sense of pride?

What I can teach them about the department that will give them a sense of pride?

What kinds of personal growth training will enhance their self-confidence and personal pride?

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.